Posts Tagged ‘Colossal Order’

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Fancy building a little model city to coo at, watching little people and cars zipping around the streets you laid out? You can do that right now with Cities: Skylines, thanks to a free trial of the full game running until Sunday. Colossal Order’s 2015’s game is a pleasant little city-builder, one largely not mega-serious about crunching numbers and honing margins, and that’s nice. Our Alec will tell you it’s one of the best non-violent games but what about the violence of paving over meadows and choking rivers with bridges? Eh, Alec? Eh? You monster. Read the rest of this entry »

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Cities: Skylines has always had an environmental bent – one of the first things you can build is a wind turbine – but with the Green Cities expansion, cleaning up polluted cities has become a major focus. There’s a slew of new buildings and policies that make it a little bit easier to keep your citizens from living under an oppressive layer of smog.

How easy, though? I’ve started up a new city to find out. My goal: a completely pollution-free utopia where everyone is happy and healthy. This is probably the nicest thing I’ve done in Skylines; certainly it’s nicer than the time I tried to flood my entire city in poo, or the time I turned off the heating to see how long it would take for everyone to freeze to death.

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Modern cities are okay but for those who’d rather dream a little utopian, Cities: Skylines today launched its Green Cities expansion. Like other Skylines expansions, Green Cities doesn’t massively expand game systems but does bring some eco-friendly new buildings to erect — blocks clad in vertical planting, solar updraft towers, organic food shops, that sort of thing — which have a few thematic new functions. They do look very nice. A free update has launched alongside the expansion too, with new content from electric cars to extra types of park.

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Green Cities might look like urban paradise, but beneath the lush vertical gardens, something sinister is percolating. Sure, the draped greenery clinging to the side of the new high density apartment blocks looks attractive, but it’s also reminiscent of post-human imagery; nature reclaiming the land. Zoom out far enough, so that the little cars and people are less apparent, and it’s not a great leap from green city to Twelve Monkeys, I Am Legend and The Last Of Us.

But forget the future for a moment because the now of Cities: Skylines [official site] upcoming expansion isn’t the paradise it initially seems to be. Your attempts to create an environmentally friendly utopia might end with the construction of a new Silicon Valley. The road to hell is paved with reclaimed wood and good intentions.

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How difficult can organising a music festival be? Oh, right. Well! If you’ve got the moxie despite being woefully underqualified, you can now step up and organise concerts with the latest “mini-expansion” for city-builder Cities: Skylines [official site]. It lets players build festival grounds, host bands, and hopefully not end up with a musical mega-hell. It’s not a deep business simulation but might be a bit of fun to brighten up your city. Read the rest of this entry »

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Cities: Skylines [official site] is a game in which every single citizen has a name, home and (if you’re playing it reasonably effectively) job, but nobody matters in the slightest. For a game with such a chummy, chipper tone, it’s weirdly cold. Dozens of people might leave town in protest at your mayoral ineptitude, or tens of thousands of people might die in a freak sewage accident, and not only does the game not care, it doesn’t even try to make you care either.

There are eight million stories in the reasonably well-developed city, but if I want a human connection to any of them, I have to build it myself.Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve done a lot of terrible things in my two year quest to ruin as many lives as possible in Cities: Skylines [official site]. I’ve allowed the dead to fester in their homes, I’ve turned off heating and electricity in the dead of winter, and once, I made an entire city drink its own poo. But with the launch of the Mass Transit expansion, I’m turning over a new leaf. Instead of making things worse, I’m going to fix my city’s awful congestion problems and be hailed a hero of the people.

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A new expansion for Cities: Skylines [official site], named Mass Transit, has arrived to expand the city-building manage ’em up’s public transport. The expansion adds ferries, monorails, cable cars, and — for those building modernist cities of tomorrow — blimps, along with new transport-y challenges, new policies, new road types, and new canal bits. Aw, it’s not for you. It’s more of a Shelbyville expansion. Read the rest of this entry »

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I don’t really ‘get’ driving cars in cities. Having always lived places where I can get everywhere I need by foot, bus, train, or bike, I am bamboozled by city-building games nudging me to build intersections resembling Celtic knots. I’m relieved that Cities: Skylines [official site] will focus on public transport in its next expansion, Mass Transit, which publishers Paradox have announced will launch on May 18th. Mass Transit will bring new forms of public transport, from ferries to whimsically utopian blimps, along with new transit hubs to ease interchanges. Here, have a look at all this in a new trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

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As long-time readers will know, I don’t believe there’s any possibility of a party unless someone brings a strategy game to the dancefloor. This year, EGX Rezzed is going to be party central. For the first time, Paradox will have a presence at the show, in the form of three playable games (including the just-announced Steel Division: Normandy 44’s multiplayer) and two developer sessions. They’re both on the Friday, with Cities: Skylines up first at 12PM and Stellaris following at 2PM. In the former, you’ll hear Colossal Order’s CEO on continuous development post-release, and working with a large community, and in the latter Stellaris’ game director will talk about the first year post-release, and the major expansion, Utopia.

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Blimps. They’re big, they’re full of hot air, they’re historically prone to crashing to earth in an unstoppable blaze. If you like blimps then we have good news for you. The physical manifestation humankind’s hubris can soon be added to your bustling metropolis in Cities: Skylines [official site] as part of the Mass Transit DLC pack, which is also adding ferries, monorails and cable cars. This is so that your commuters can get to work more efficiently. I don’t know what right-thinking member of the public would get the 7am zeppelin every morning, but the mayors of Cities: Skylines have never been ones to indulge sensible policies.Read the rest of this entry »

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Cities: Skylines is a game about building roads. Its lovely set of road-building tools allow you to scribe beautiful curved boulevards into the gentle slopes and combes of virgin lands, and it has inspired 19-page forum topics entitled Show Us Your Interchanges and Steam Workshop lists 24,482 interchange designs.

Oh, and an incidental byproduct of a good road system is the growth of a city around it.

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Cities: Skylines [official site] is one of those games that if given the chance will swallow you whole. Like any simulation game worth its salt, it’s comprised of so many moving parts that only by digging deep into its systems, mechanics and quirks can you hope to scratch its veneer and begin to understand what makes it tick. It’s a wonderful game once you do, but getting there can be a daunting task – even for the most tenacious of players.

User-made mods, of which there are now thousands, make this process a wee bit easier. It’s been the best part of two years since Alec shared his favourites (which are absolutely worth checking out), however the following list gathers the ones I’ve come to find essential in crafting my own homegrown cities and keeping my populace happy.

That last part might be a lie, but I swear that’s not my fault. (It totally is.)

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I’m impressed they waited this long. Using earthquakes and hurricanes to play skyscraper dominoes has long been the alpha and the omega feature of citybuilder games (if you didn’t trash the suburbs with an alien invasion, you weren’t playing Sim City 2000 right). It’s taken Cities: Skylines [official site] 19 months to do the entirely obvious thing, and I’m glad to say it’s done it in style. Its new natural disasters are absolutely terrifying.Read the rest of this entry »

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If you, like me, kneel at your bedside to whisper the prayer “Lord Godzilla, rise from your slumber and scour humanity from the Earth with your purifying nuclear fire”, you may be comforted by apocalyptic visions in the upcoming Cities: Skylines [official site] expansion. Natural Disasters won’t bring rampaging monsters to the spunky build ’em up (as far as I know) but it will rain meteors, wash sins away with tsunami, and all that good stuff. The wait is almost over, as publishers Paradox have announced Natural Disasters will launch on November 29th. They’ve shown it off in a new trailer too. Read the rest of this entry »

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Several cities in the popular construction sim Cities: Skylines [official site] have been destroyed or heavily damaged by a freak series of natural disasters. A tornado, earthquake, forest fire, meteor impact and flood all occurred within seconds of each other and devastated a number of metropolises, killing thousands of tiny people who do not really exist. Footage of the deadly phenomenon was captured by the developers of the game, who are thrilled with the result. Warning: the following video footage contains images some viewers may find mildly interesting.

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There are tons of ways to modify your Cities: Skylines [official site] experience. With official DLC packs that incorporate anything from bustling nightlife to horrific apocalyptic scenarios, and a bustling modding community, the custom city-building experience you’ve dreamed of is right at your fingertips.

Paradox Interactive this week launched a new content pack to honor its talented player content creators. The first Cities: Skylines Content Creator Pack is titled Art Deco, and features the work of Matt ‘Shroomblaze’ Crux.

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Building and running a safe and efficient city can be fun, sure. Cities: Skylines [official site] is already great for that. You know what’s also fun? Smashing things. Cities: Skylines is now trying harder with that. Publishers Paradox today announced a new expansion for Colossal Order’s city-builder, named Natural Disasters. Oh yes!